Lost in the Negev
One example is a miracle of guidance when Dan Morrice was guided out of a life threatening situation in a remote desert and was able to get to safety is described in Chapter 16 of [1].
Dan Morrice describes a time when he was walking alone across the Negev desert and, after, perhaps foolishly, venturing along a valley which was off the edge of his map, found himself lost and facing an impassible cliff at the end of a valley. Partly because the rocks had been worn smooth by many flash floods in the area, it would be too difficult, if not impossible, to climb safely. The day was coming to an end and too late to turn back. Camping there would have been dangerous because of the possibility of a flash flood. In addition he was low on water. He knew that he was in a life threatening situation.
In desperation, he looked at the cliff and tried to see a way of attempting the climb despite the strong risks of falling. It was at that point when he sensed a strong urge to turn back. Despite his own incredulity and reluctance to do so, he went with the urge and was then prompted to turn left. When he did so, after about 10 minutes, he came to a the start of a narrow track which provided a safe way out of the valley and to the top of the cliff which had barred his way. The path could only be seen from where he was then standing and would have been completely hidden from his sight previously.
Was that a miracle or was there a physicalist explanation?
The simple interpretation of that event would be divine guidance, or at least a non-physical intervention.
Other possibilities could be:
- Many people experience inner voices or sudden mental impressions—especially under stress, dehydration, or sleep deprivation.
- Dan’s brain was processing environmental cues subconsciously—like subtle terrain gradients, the angle of light, or patterns in animal movement—and generated a “gut instinct” that was interpreted as a voice.
- “People sometimes guess the right direction. If he had gone the wrong way, we wouldn't be talking about it.” This is often called the survivorship bias: we focus on the cases that turn out well, and ignore the others that didn’t. Humans are storytelling creatures, and we naturally weave coherence and purpose into experiences—especially life-or-death ones.
However, there are factors of the situation which leads to the probability of a physical explanation being very low.
- Hearing an inner voice, while perhaps not unusual, does not normally yield accurate and life saving information such as happened here. Thus possibility 1 is unlikely.
- The traveller was quite naïve of desert conditions and possible dangers rendering possibility 2 very unlikely.
- He had no knowledge of the local terrain and was not aware of the existence of the path, much less where it could be located. To find it by guesswork would not be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Possibility 3 is astronomically unlikely in this case.
While a naturalistic explanation is certainly possible, the Theistic explanation would seem the most likely unless there was a pre-existing physicalist and/or atheistic belief.
It is hard to put a figure on the probability of a natural explanation but if taking 1% would arguably be a conservative estimate. If we assume complete agnosticism with respect to God we can set the probability of God’s existence to 0.5. Then, according to Swinburne’s method, the probability of supernatural intervention comes out as 0.985. A very strong probability indeed. Even if the belief in Theism was reduced to just 5% the probability of a miraculous explanation being the more likely one is still 0.84.
Far from being irrational to believe this was a miracle, it shifts the onus of proof onto the sceptic.
A case of Divine Healing
Jennifer Rees-Larcombe [2] suffered from a severe, virus-triggered neurological condition, diagnosed as viral encephalitis. She was ill for eight years, needing repeated visits to ICU in hospital and being confined to a wheelchair and being severely disabled. While speaking at a Christian gathering, a member of the audience who was a new believer and knew little of prayer for healing felt a prompt to say to Jennifer that God was going to heal her. Jennifer asked the lady to pray for her and, after some encouragement, she did so and Jennifer was spontaneously healed. Having arrived at the meeting in a wheelchair and hardly strong enough to give the talk, she left unassisted and has been well ever since.
The case has been described in several of her books [2-4]. Again the circumstances of the healing and the low chance of an illness like that spontaneously remitting, the probability of the event being a miracle and not due to natural causes is high.
Not surprisingly, there are those who seek to find a natural alternative explanation of what happened. For instance:
- While her family, church, doctor and friends were in no doubt what had happened to her, people who had never met her were outspoken in their attacks on her integrity or in claiming that the original diagnosis had been wrong - much to the fury of her doctor.
- Some people asserted that the whole illness must have been psychosomatic and demanded to see her medical records which, when they saw them, claimed that they must have been muddled with another patient!
- Some even suggested that the whole thing was staged in order to gain publicity or even that there was a twin sister hiding away somewhere who had been substituted in order to deceive.
These reactions show the lengths sceptics will go to in order to make the facts fit their beliefs rather than to be willing to review their beliefs in the light of new facts. If anything, the irrationality of these challenges add weight to the veracity of the miracle rather than casting doubt.
The existence of miracles such as these gives more strong evidence that there is more to our existence than the material world and gives strong evidence for Theism being the best hypothesis.
[1] Dan Morrice, “Finding the peacemakers”, Hodder and Stoughton, 2021, 978-1-529-35818-6
[2] Jennifer Rees-Larcombe, “Journey into God’s heart”, Hodder and Stoughton, 2006
[3] Jennifer Rees-Larcombe, “Beyond Healing”
[4] Jennifer Rees-Larcombe, “Unexpected Healing”